I spent last week porting the Graphics Muse Tools to GIMP 2.2.3. All the C plugins work pretty much as with GIMP 1.2 though there are a few minor functional bugs (see the bug page on the web site). There shouldn't be any crashes - at least none that I know of.

I also cleaned out the old gimppreview that I had been using. I now use GdkPixbuf's along with Gimp's builtin thumbnail function that returns a pixbuf. That means GFXLayers is much less weighty - no more carrying around a ton of widgets for the previews. GFXTrans also benefited from this.

I still have to pull out the deprecated features of both GIMP and GTK+, however, which is why this is a Beta release.

If anyone wants to try these, you can pull the source code tarball from the web site or check it out of CVS. Source should build on Unix/Linux boxes (but I've only tried it on Linux). I don't have a clue how to build this for Windows or MacOS X (though I'd love to try the latter). http://www.ximba.org/gfxmuse/download.html

Please let me know if you try them and most especially if you find bugs. If you can, please log the bugs in the bug db on the web site.

FYI: these are no longer shareware, they are open source. If anyone wants to work on these just drop me an email and I'll set you up an account on CVS.

On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 14:17:37 -0200, Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris wrote:

I went to the site, and did not find easily a description of what the plug-ins do (althoug I am in a hurry). Can you give us a url?

http://www.ximba.org/gfxmuse/gfxmuse.html

Links to the download page, wiki, etc. are in the upper right corner. I tested the web site design under Firefox and IE (don't remember which version, but it was on WinXP). It might have problems rendering correctly under other browsers, though I tried to make it W3C compliant to some extent (probably got a few pages still to debug).

The plug-in most asked for is GFXArrows, which draws arrows in varying shapes. Who'dda thought that one would be the popular one?

The one I think is most useful is GFXLayers. It allows you to visually align layers in all sorts of ways, interactively, using thumbnails of the layers. It's not the best UI design, but it works well. Maybe if I get some feedback on the problems with the UI I'll be able to make it easier to use.

GFXShapes needs thumbnail support. I need to add GdkPixbuf support to it for showing the page preview layout, similar to the way GFXLayers lets you drag layer previews around the page. It probably needs a way to easily add new, prebuilt shapes. GFXShapes was my answer to the common question "How do you draw simple shapes?" GFig is the normal tool for this, but I guess some people find it daunting to use. It's not *that* hard. :-)

GFXTrans is best for doing multiple rotations for animations. The builtin rotation transform for GIMP is better for simple layer rotations.

GFXMerge is the result of a posting someone put on one of the mailing lists asking for a way to split layers out into their own images or to merge layers from one image into another. It's very good at merging (splitting is broke in the beta but will probably be fixed soon), though I don't know how often anyone needs that.

GFXCards lets you duplicate an image onto multiple cells, like for printing business cards, or create a printable image for use with greeting cards using an existing image for one side of the card. I use it mostly for business cards. It's a brute force approach, creating a big image at the correct DPI. A better method would be to generate a PS image that can be sent to the printer using a single copy of the orignal image. That would sure be a lot less memory intensive.

Most of these (or is it all? I can't remember) are supposed to allow you to save your presets as XML files and reload them later. This is good for GFXShapes and GFXArrows, for example. Unfortunately, in the beta release the presets may not be working. I'll get that fixed. I doubt its a big problem - they worked fine under GIMP 1.2.

And...my most profound thank you for converting your shareware into an Open Source application. Really, really really!

Nobody was paying for them anyway. Just saves me the trouble of trying to build it for multiple platforms. It's a lot of work maintaining a bunch of different distributions like that. :-) I was also maintaining ports of a ton of plug-ins I found on the net as part of the original Graphics Muse Tools CD because they were not available in binary format for end users. But alas, few people paid for that so I dropped support for those other plugins. Way too much work for one guy. Now I just maintain the ones I wrote.

Hope you find them useful. I need to get GIMP Perl working eventually to make sure the Perl plugins work under GIMP 2.2 too.

On Mon, 2005-01-31 at 15:24, Sven Neumann wrote:

Hi,

Howdy.

May I ask why you are not using the preview widgets found in libgimpui?

Sure.

That would give your plug-ins the same user interface for previews that all other GIMP plug-ins use. Is there functionality missing in our preview widgets that you would have needed? Please tell us about it then, so that we can add that functionality for GIMP 2.4.

I looked at porting to the libgimpui previews but the documentation wasn't clear to me (not that its bad - I just didn't quite get it right off the bat). After thinking it over a bit I realized that carrying around the object weight of a widget wasn't really necessary for my purposes.

So far, only two of the plug-ins use previews: GFXTrans and GFXLayers. The former *could* use the libgimpui preview but zooming and panning really aren't necessary for this plug-in. I just need a thumbnail to shove in the middle a drawing area. Take a look at the plugin and you'll see what I mean. I'm not modifying the layer content, I'm just doing a transform on it. And the preview doesn't get updated with the interactive transform. Its a hacky solution, but I did it originally before the much nicer builtin in transforms for 2.x came out. It's only real advantage is allowing you to do multiple, identical transforms into multiple layers.

GFXLayers is much more intense - it used to carry a gimppreview (this was the old gimppreview code that floated around a while back) for each layer, sans zooming/panning features. These were stuffed in a GtkFixed widget and moved around by the user. GtkFixed isn't recommended for new applications according to the GTK+ 2.6 docs, and that's when I realized I really didn't need widgets if GIMP could just pass me the right sized pixbuf - which it now does. Again, I just need a very small thumbnail to represent the layers. In fact, there is an option to turn off the previews if that gets too confusing (which it can be if you have a *lot* of layers). That came about because it got really slow in the old version with lots of layers using the older gimppreview code I had. Additionally, the weight of carrying around widgets for all those layers is overkill for this plugin. I just need a simple pixbuf for each layer.

So, it's nothing against the gimppreview widgets - these look and perform fine in all the stock plugins. It's just that the gimppreview widgets provide far more than I really need.

This is all just one design perspective, of course. I'm open to suggestions on making these plugins better.